I read this article with interest and was glad to see it mentioned laser welding. When I was about 17 years old (*having lied about my age) I got a remarkably well-paid job in a Silicon Valley laser welding shop, fabricating thermally sensitive fuses of some exotic materials that were fairly difficult to attach to a standard electronics package, hence the exotic method. Fun times, once the lead tech mixed up the gases for the laser machine and we had a nice 50-foot tall pillar of fire on the shop floor that sent us all running for cover.
I feel like I experienced the tail-end of something that was once quite common in the USA, and I was able to afford a decent apartment in Silicon Valley back then on my own with no college degree, though I did see that the folks upstairs in the R & D division were much better paid and had better jobs (I was once sourced to them as a gopher for a couple of weeks) so I went off to college and graduate school and never really told any of those people where I had come from, just nodded and smiled along and used my assembly line background to great effect in getting things done at scale. I pretended I was one of them, and that was a good move.
See what happens when you let the rats out of their cages, governor?
I feel like I experienced the tail-end of something that was once quite common in the USA, and I was able to afford a decent apartment in Silicon Valley back then on my own with no college degree, though I did see that the folks upstairs in the R & D division were much better paid and had better jobs (I was once sourced to them as a gopher for a couple of weeks) so I went off to college and graduate school and never really told any of those people where I had come from, just nodded and smiled along and used my assembly line background to great effect in getting things done at scale. I pretended I was one of them, and that was a good move.
See what happens when you let the rats out of their cages, governor?